steven's review of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
** spoiler alert **
The review for this one is a toss-up between one and five stars. It was an amazing story of how a twelve-year-old boy survived the armed conflicts in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. It's well-written, provides vivid imagery, and evokes the horrors of war.
The one star is because of the vivid imagery. Let's be perfectly clear about this: people die in this book. Blood spatters everywhere, usually blood that should be kept inside some of the narrator's closest friends. From the very first page to the very last, you are kept on a rollercoaster ride of emotion, happy one minute and torn with grief the next, until you and the narrator have both attained a kind of wariness to happiness since you know it won't last. There's a constant suspense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it does it hits the ground like a ten-ton hammer.
This book is disturbing. It's a good read, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone who has trouble sleeping; this wont' help at all. Every ...more
The one star is because of the vivid imagery. Let's be perfectly clear about this: people die in this book. Blood spatters everywhere, usually blood that should be kept inside some of the narrator's closest friends. From the very first page to the very last, you are kept on a rollercoaster ride of emotion, happy one minute and torn with grief the next, until you and the narrator have both attained a kind of wariness to happiness since you know it won't last. There's a constant suspense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it does it hits the ground like a ten-ton hammer.
This book is disturbing. It's a good read, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone who has trouble sleeping; this wont' help at all. Every ...more
comments (showing 1-1 of 1)
newest »
date
